1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to machines for forming barbed tape products, and more particularly to a system and method for automatically forming barbed tape concertina product.
2. State of the Art
Barbed tape products are known. Much of the process of making such products has been automated. For example, forming the barbs from a stock tape material has been automated. Also, placement of a reinforcing wire within a channel formed in the tape has been automated. Bending of the product into round coils is also part of known production processes. Efforts to automatically and efficiently clip adjacent strands of product together have been unsuccessful. Accordingly, most manufacturers rely upon manually attaching adjacent strands of the product in a concertina or other desired pattern. Most concertina products have three attachment elements for every two winds (or loops) of the product strand. These elements are generally placed at equally spaced circumferential positions along the product strand. Known barbed tape products seldom purposely depart from this pattern except for between rolls when attaching is suspended, the strand is severed, and the machine is re-threaded for a subsequent roll of product.
Attachment elements, which are generally U-shaped clips with arms that extend from a base and surround a pair of strands are known. In these clips, the arms interleave with each other in an attached configuration. These clips are attached with a clip gun that is typically actuated by a human operator. For convenience, multiple clips are held together in a string by a pair of filaments. The string of clips is fed into the clip gun so that the clip gun may be actuated repeatedly.